A dualism began between Palermo and Turin, which would not have reached the point that it did reach, if La Farina, who was commissioned by Cavour to promote annexation, had not launched into a furious personal warfare with his fellow-Sicilian Crispi, a far stronger combatant than he. Garibaldi ended by putting La Farina on board a Sardinian man-of-war, and begging the admiral to convey him home. The dictator bombarded the king's Government with advice, to which Cavour alludes without irritation: "He writes and rewrites, and telegraphs night and day, urging us with counsels, warnings, reproaches—I might almost say menaces." Garibaldi, he goes on to say, has a generous character, poetic instincts, but his is an untamed nature, on which certain impressions leave ineffaceable traces; he feels the cession of Nice as a personal injury, and he will never forgive it. The king has a certain influence over him, but it would be madness to seek to employ it in favour of the Ministry; he would lose it, which would be a great misfortune. How few ministers who, like Cavour, were accustomed to be all-powerful, would have met unrelenting opposition in this spirit!
The influence of the king was sought by Napoleon to induce Garibaldi to stop short at Messina, but he can hardly have been surprised when the General showed no disposition to serve his sovereign so ill as to obey him. He then proposed that the French and British admirals should be instructed to inform Garibaldi that they had orders to prevent him from crossing the straits. Lord John Russell replied that, in the opinion of Government, the Neapolitans should be left to receive or repel Garibaldi as they pleased; nevertheless, if France interfered alone, they would limit themselves to disapproving and protesting. But Napoleon did not wish to interfere alone; the effect would be to make British influence paramount in Italy, and possibly even to cause Sicily to crave a British protectorate. In great haste he assured the Foreign Secretary that his chief desire was to act about Southern Italy in whatever way was approved by England. Italy was saved from a great peril in 1860, firstly, by English goodwill, and, secondly, by the absence of any real agreement between the Continental Powers. Had there been a concert of Europe, the passage of Garibaldi to Calabria would have been barred.
By this time no one was more determined than Cavour himself that not a palm of ground should be left to the Bourbon dynasty, but he still thought it necessary to save appearances. Thus he met the too late advances of the Neapolitan Government, not by a refusal to treat, but by proposing a condition with which Francis, as an obedient son of the Church, could not comply: the formal recognition of the union of Romagna with Piedmont. Strict moralists, like Lanza, would have wished him to send the ambassadors of the King of Naples about their business, and to declare war on any pretext, and so escape from "a hybrid and perilous game." Cavour looked upon the Neapolitan Government as doomed, and that by its own fault, its own obstinacy, its own rejection of the plank of safety, which, almost at the risk of doing a wrong to Italy, he had advised his king to offer it three months before. He felt no scruples in accelerating its fall. The means he took may not have been the best means, but he thought them good enough in dealing with a system which was a by-word for bad faith and corruption. He wished that the end might come before Garibaldi crossed the straits, or, at least, when he was still far from Naples. Thus a repetition of the Sicilian dictatorship would be impossible. To what measures he resorted is not known with any accuracy; he was carrying on a policy without the knowledge of the king or the cabinet, and no trustworthy account exists of it. What is known is that Cavour, as a conspirator, failed.
Till the Captain of the Thousand appeared, the people would not move. They knew nothing of the merits of a limited monarchy, but they could vibrate to the electric thrill of a great emotion, such as that which made their hearts rise and swell when the organ in the village church pealed forth the airs of Bellini or Donizetti on a feast day. Garibaldi was the Mahdi of a new dispensation, which was to end earthquakes, the cholera, poverty, to heal all wounds, dry all tears. Yes, it was worth while to rise now! King Francis seems to have understood the situation; he sat down to wait for Destiny in a red shirt. When the liberator was sufficiently near, he is reported to have called the commanders of the National Guard, and to have addressed them in these words: "As your—that is, our common friend, Don Peppe, approaches, my work ends and yours begins. Keep the peace. I have ordered the troops that remain to capitulate."
The British Government had all along recommended Cavour to leave Garibaldi alone to finish the task he had so well begun; he did not take the advice, but in the end he must have recognised its wisdom. At the very last moment it might have been possible to get Victor Emmanuel's authority proclaimed at Naples before Garibaldi entered the city, or, at any rate, Cavour thought so; but the attempt would have worn a graceless look at that late hour, and it was not made. Cavour never forgot the services which Garibaldi had rendered to Italy; "the greatest," he said, "that a man could render her." When the dissension between them began, he might have convoked Parliament and fought out the battle before the Chamber, but, though he would have saved his prestige, he would have lost Italy. He preferred to risk his reputation and to save Italy. In order to make Italy, he believed it to be of vital importance to keep the hero on good terms with the king. Garibaldi was a great moral power, not only in Italy, but in Europe. If Cavour entered into a struggle with him, he would have the majority of old diplomatists on his side, but European public opinion would be against him, and it would be right. He argued thus with those who mistook his forbearance for weakness, when it was really strength.
Cavour seriously thought that among the inconvenient consequences of Garibaldi's ascendency might be a war with Austria, forced on the Government by the victorious condottiere in the intoxication of success. He was resolved as a statesman to do what he could to prevent so great an imprudence. He had assured the British Government in writing that he had no present intention of attacking Austria, and in this he was perfectly sincere. Still he did not shrink from the possibility. He wrote to Ricasoli: "If we were beaten by overwhelming force, the cause of Italy would not be lost; she would arise from her ruins, as Piedmont arose from the field of Novara." To another friend he made what was, perhaps, the only boast he ever uttered: "I would answer for the result if I possessed the art of war as I possess the art of politics." For the rest, he added characteristically, When a course became the only one, what was the good of counting up its dangers? You ought to find out the way of overcoming them.
CHAPTER XII
THE KINGDOM OF ITALY
When Garibaldi entered Naples, Cavour had already decided on the momentous step of sending the king's forces into Umbria and the Marches of Ancona. At the end of August he wrote: "We are touching the supreme moment; with God's help, Italy will be made in three months." If constitutional monarchy was to triumph it could no longer stand still; neither Austrian arms nor republican propaganda could so jeopardise the scheme of an Italian kingdom under a prince of the House of Savoy as the demonstration of facts that the Government of Victor Emmanuel had lost the lead. Moreover, it became daily more probable that, if the king did not invade the Roman States from the north, Garibaldi would invade them from the south, and this Cavour was determined to prevent. If a Garibaldian invasion succeeded, France would come into the field; if it failed, all the great results hitherto accomplished would be compromised. Garibaldi at most could only have disposed of half his little army of volunteers, and in Lamoricière, the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, he would have met a stouter antagonist than the Bourbon generals. But the party of action urged him towards Rome, cost what it might, with the impracticability of men who expect the walls of cities to fall at the blast of the trumpet. Every reason, patriotic, political, geographical, justified Cavour's resolution. It was only by force that Umbria and the Marches had been retained under the papal sway in 1859; there was not an Italian who did not look on their liberation as a patriotic duty. The nominal pretext for the war, as has happened in most of the wars of this century, only partially touched the point at issue; Cavour professed to see a menace in the increase of the Pope's army, and demanded its disbandment. In a literal sense, fifteen or twenty thousand men could not be a menace to Italy. Still it must be doubted if any state could have tolerated, in what was now its midst, even this small force, commanded by a foreign general, composed largely of foreign recruits, and proclaiming itself the advance guard of reactionary Europe. Lamoricière said that wherever the revolution appeared, it must be knocked on the head as if it were a mad dog. By "the revolution" he meant Italian unity.
Cavour, the cabinet, and the king were already labouring under the penalties of excommunication by the Bull issued in the spring against all who had taken part in the annexation of Romagna. When Prince Charles of Lorraine in 1690 advised the Emperor to withdraw his claims to Spain and concentrate his energies on uniting Italy, he observed that in order to join the kingdom of Naples with Lombardy, it would be necessary to reduce the Pope to the sole city of Rome. This most able statesman of the House of Hapsburg continued: "The services of very learned doctors should be obtained to instruct the people, both by word of mouth and by writing, on the inutility and illusion of excommunications when it is a question of temporalities, which Jesus Christ never destined to His Church, and which she cannot possess without outraging His example and compromising His Gospel." Cavour did not seek the learned doctors, because he knew that the religious side of the matter, however vital it seemed to the young Breton noblemen who enlisted under Lamoricière, left unmoved the Pope's subjects, who had a mixture of scorn and hatred for the rule of priests, such as was not felt for any government in Italy. For the rest, familiarity lessens the effect of spiritual fulminations, and even of those not spiritual. For three months Cavour had sustained the running fire of all except one of the foreign representatives at Turin; as he wrote to the Marquis E. d'Azeglio: "I have the whole corps diplomatique on my back, Hudson excepted; I let them have their say and I go on." He deplored the sad fate of diplomacy, which always took the most interest in bad causes, and was the more favourable to a government the worse it was.[1] If ces messieurs protested or departed, they must; he could not arrest the current. If he tried, it would carry him away with it, "which would not be a great evil," but it would carry away the dynasty also. The Peace of Villafranca had caused the Italians to conceive an irresistible desire for unity—events were stronger than men, and he should only stop before fleets and armies.